Scatter the darkness

It’s the first day of winter: winter is cold and dry where I live and often feels to me like darkness. But there can be mystery and hope and potential in darkness. In Psalm 139, one of my favorite chapters of Scripture, I love the power and perspective of light affecting the dark: “for darkness is as light to you, o God.” (v. 12) The following verse and poem encourage me.

Arise, shine. For your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. –Isaiah 60:1

If the eyes that judge the dark and light see only moral metaphors,

All dark is bad, all light is good, and that’s the end of it.

But eyes that look for beauty too, for grace, and mystery, and peace,

Delight more in dawn’s dappled hour and choirs of stars at dusk

Than in the mid-day’s unrelenting glare.

It is not that they fear the light. They don’t; they love and need it.

It is that light has qualities as artists everywhere know well.

What quality of light surrounds the shepherds in their filed?

What light does Mother Mary need to know how she should love her child?

Why do the Magi travel gladly in the dark? Ah, see…It’s where the light they need is found.

Darkness is like silence: some is full of dread, But most gives up its threat

When just a single flame of light scatters its own qualities into the night.

The Light of All Creation is sweet music in the dark: Full of joy, brimming with life, bringing what is very god and scattering silence with a song.

God’s spirit is a burning wick the world cannot blow out.

Light of creation… scatter the darkness.

-poem, front cover, St. Olaf Christmas Festival program, 2009